All in the Family - ...Those Were The Days! 'Complete 9th Season' DVDs Announced **UPDATE: Pre-Order Link**

Shout! Factory schedules the final season of Archie Bunker's original series

Posted by David Lambert

2/16/2011

After releasing the first six seasons on DVD from 2002-2007, Sony held back on putting out further All In The Family sets, but in 2010 they licensed the remaining seasons to Shout! Factory to put out. As a result, the seventh season came out last October, and a month ago the next-to-last season arrived in participating stores. Today Shout! Factory has announced to retailers that the final season of the original series will be in stores on May 17th, when they release All in the Family - The Complete 9th Season.

This 3-disc set is expected to cost $29.93 SRP, and you can see the package art down below. Besides Carroll O'Connor as "Archie Bunker," Jean Stapleton as his wife "Edith," you'll also see Danielle Brisebois joining the cast as 9-year-old "Stephanie," who the Bunkers care for on behalf of Edith's cousin Floyd (Stephanie's father). Allan Melvin recurs as Archie's friend Barney Hefner, and other guest stars include Phil Leeds, Estelle Parsons, Sandy Kenyon, Isabel Sanford as "Louise Jefferson," and a special double-length episode where the Bunkers visit California to see Rob Reiner as "Michael 'Meathead' Stivic" and Sally Struthers as "Gloria Bunker-Stivic."

Although not technically considered part of the ninth and last season for broadcast syndication purposes, when the show originally aired there was a 90-minute special that was first transmitted on March 4, 1979, titled "The 200th Episode of All in the Family"; it was a clip show hosted by Norman Lear. A few weeks ago at the Shout! Factory official message board, a fan asked if this would be included on an eventual Season 9 DVD set, and the answer from Shout! DVD producer Brian Ward was that he thought his colleague Brian Blum, who is the producer of this particular title, had said it would be included on this release as a bonus feature.

At the same time another fan asked over there if the spin-off series, Archie Bunker's Place, would be something fans could expect from Shout! in the future. For those of you who don't recall, season eight started out with a double-length episode called "Archie Gets the Business," with Archie and a partner buying Kelcy's Bar, a place Archie was often shown to hang out at with his friends over the course of the show. When All In The Family ended, they decided to continue the story of Archie Bunker in a new spin-off titled Archie Bunker's Place, which featured tales set primarily at the bar (rather than at the Bunker home, which was the main location of the original series). The new show ran for 4 seasons, and in 2006 Sony released Archie Bunker's Place - The Complete 1st Season, but hasn't made a move toward the other three. So the question for Shout! was whether or not they would pick up those remaining three seasons of the spin-off. Brian Ward's answer, just a few weeks ago, was "We don't currently have the rights to ABP...If the demand appears to be there, you may very well see ABP released. But, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a deal that still needs to be worked out at some point down the road."

UPDATE (2/17): Amazon has now added a pre-order listing for this title, and we've got the button link just below. Pricing is confirmed at $29.93 SRP, but you can lock in your copy at a discount!